Something in the neatness with which he delivers this long sentence tells Iris that either he has just rehearsed it as a conversation-opener, or that it’s one of his stock lines. She says, “It must have something to do with the law of averages.” He throws back his balding head and laughs as if she has made a great joke, and she stands there, wishing he’d stop. It occurs to her then that he’s not the person he’s supposed to be. All these years she’s never noticed before how falsely he behaves, and it seems to her sad that out of his desire to get along with every member of his congregation and to be seen to be a good man, he has so twisted himself that she doubts he knows any more who he is.
She has hit on a truth, she knows it by a certain solidity she feels that surrounds the thought. Such an insight is unlike her, she feels. She has never been a perceptive person, and it so clearly puts a barrier between herself and this man she has known a dozen years and unquestioningly respected, that not for the first time she wonders if Barney’s death has done something to her, stripped her of a layer of protection, maybe, that in the past saved her from such unwelcome insights.
“Supper’s ready,” a woman calls over the voices of the small crowd gathered in the basement of the church and, grateful, Iris turns away from him toward the buffet table that’s laden with steaming pots of meatballs and gravy, lasagna, cabbage rolls, rice and noodle casseroles, platters of cold meat, green salads, jellied salads, potato salads, freshly baked buns, pickles, cheeses — there’s no end to it, and there’s a second table at right angles to it covered with desserts smothered in whipped cream and decorated with dark chocolate or glowing, colourful glazed fruits. A regular cornucopia, she thinks.
As she moves toward the feast, Iris notes the satisfying way the blue carpet perks up the otherwise shabby basement. The church, a large white frame structure, had been built after the Second World War, a time when the community was filled with hope, and it seemed the town would keep on growing, maybe even be a city one day. It has a bell tower, complete with a huge cast-iron bell from a foundry in, of all places, Quebec. Iris listens, as she has since she was a child, for its deep-throated pealing as she enters the town every Sunday morning. Imported from England, behind the altar, there’s a large stained-glass window of Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and fishes; a brilliant blue sea roils up behind Him, and white fishing boats gleam in the lower corner. As a child, she’d thought it the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, but when she’d said so, her father grunted, “You’d think there weren’t any wheat fields in the Bible.” Now he, along with her grandparents, are buried in the cemetery on the hillside above the town.
It was a short-lived boom; the town’s population steadied at eight hundred, then began a slow drop to its present six hundred souls. Now the church is almost too big for its diminished congregation to keep running: the huge fuel bills because of the long, bitter winters, the repeated roof repairs from winds that regularly gust to near-hurricane force, the cost of the expert hired to repair the window when the soldering holding the lead in place crumbled away. These came first, ahead of the refurbishing of the basement. In the end, she and Barney had donated the money to buy the new carpet.
“Did you bring this?” Angela asks, dropping a slice of cold roast beef on her plate, and shepherding her son ahead of her. Iris nods.
She’s surprised to see Angela here, she doesn’t always make it to church events, but tonight not only are her four kids in tow, but so is Orland who is holding the baby and arranging the other two at a table across the room. Iris tries to imagine Lannie at a table with a husband and children, but it shades off too quickly into the dreams she has been having about her. Silly, pointless dreams, eventless dreams: Lannie playing with her cat, Fuzzy; Lannie in her pale green silk graduation dress they’d gone all the way to Calgary to buy; Lannie in the kitchen learning to bake bread with Iris. In the dreams she and Iris chat cheerfully together as they never did in real life. The dreams disturb Iris and she wishes they’d stop.
“Not everybody can eat those spicy casseroles,” Iris explains. “Barney —” she’s about to say, “hated them,” but Angela is bending over her small son, not hearing her.
“Some of us can’t live without them,” a voice says in her ear. Its masculine timbre so unexpected and unfamiliar sends an abrupt shiver down her back. She looks to her left and sees a stranger, a rare thing at one of these occasions where mostly it’s the same people week after week, year after year. His sleeve brushes her arm as he reaches for the lasagna and the skin of her forearm prickles. She steals a quick look at him: dark eyes, wavy, chestnut, too-long hair — too long for Chinook, anyway — a threadbare black sportscoat over a crisp white T-shirt, faded blue jeans. Not exactly the standard costume around here. Somebody’s relative from the city, she supposes, piling lettuce salad onto her plate.
She takes her full plate and follows Angela and her son, planning to sit with them, realizing too late that Angela, Orland, and their children, plus Orland’s parents, fill the entire table themselves. Feeling marooned, alone among all these families, she glances quickly around. People are milling about, two tables are already full, people are standing by others waiting to be joined by their spouses and relatives or friends, and dreading that second when, seeing her standing alone, all of them at once will call to her with forced joviality, she plunks herself down on the nearest available chair and pulls it up to its empty table. Immediately it begins to fill with, not couples, she notices, but other single — that is, widowed — women: Isobel
Gallant, Marie Chapuis, Ardath Richards, spinsters being almost non-existent in Chinook. The perception that now she’s a member of their unenvied ranks fills her with a dismay that makes her lower her head. Only a month ago people would have been flattered to have her sit at their table.
Henry Swan’s voice rises above the confusion of sounds. He wants to say grace, there’s much scraping of chairs and then a moment’s silence during which he says a quick blessing, ending with, to Iris’s ears, a too-hearty “Dig in, everybody!” Everyone sits and immediately voices rise around the room.
“Jay Anselm,” that same voice says, and she looks up quickly to see the man from the buffet pulling out the chair on her right, the only one left at the table. His plate is piled high with food, and at the sight of it she has to hide a smile.
“I’m Iris Christie,” she says. The others seated around the table give their names and then go back to eating and chatting with their neighbours. He can’t mind being the only man at the table, apparently doesn’t realize how rare it is.
“Have you just moved to town?” she asks, after a long silence.
“I’m just trying to decide whether to move into town or not,” he tells her. Puzzled, Iris says a non-committal “Oh.”
“I’m working on a novel,” he explains, although she hasn’t asked. “It’s set in Western Canada, in a small town, and I’m looking for one that
feels
right. You know?” In that last phrase his tone becomes so urgent that, a little startled, she glances involuntarily at him. He’s not as young as she’d thought, must be in his mid-to-late thirties. In that quick, surreptitious glance she sees too that if he let his beard grow, it would be very dark, and that his nose is straight, his lips sensuous and full. She wants to ask, What do you mean, a novel? or, Feels right for what? — she has never met a writer before — but, out of her depth, she falls back on formula.
“Have you been in Chinook long?” She can tell by the falling away of all the voices that everyone at the table is listening for his answer.
“Got here a couple of days ago. What is this stuff?” This is so abrupt and loud that everybody stares at him. He grins sheepishly. “Sorry,” he says, to the table at large. “It’s really good, I’ve just never
tasted anything like it before.” The woman on his right says, “That’s Shirley Manning’s recipe. She brings it to all the suppers. It has Chinese noodles in it, and …” She and the other women begin to discuss with what Iris regards as excessive seriousness the ingredients of the casserole and how to make it. Jay leans close to Iris and whispers, “It’s awful,” and startled — the comment is so like Barney — she chokes back a laugh, remembering that people are watching her, that it’s too soon for laughter, that she’s talking to a stranger.
After the meal the men sit in groups talking, the children run around screaming until the adults hush them, and the women begin cleaning. As Iris is washing dishes, Jay comes and dries them along with Ardath Richards and Marie Chapuis. Ardath and Marie come and go, putting away the clean dishes and wiping the tables, but Jay stays beside Iris while eagerly looking around the room as if it and everything in it is of special interest to him, halting occasionally to study a dish he’s drying, but in a way that tells Iris he really isn’t seeing it. Iris is missing Barney; his absence has settled into her bones, a steady, intimate ache that never leaves her. She supposes she’ll grow used to it, but still, she can’t stop herself from glancing quickly over her shoulder to the big room full of people she has known all her life, as if she might find him there.
“Are you a farmer?” Jay asks her. “Henry said you’ve just been widowed.” She ducks her head, tears have risen at the suddenness of his comment. “I beg your pardon,” he says. “I’m not very good at this.” She wonders, then realizes he means at making small talk.
“You better get the hang of it soon if you’re going to stay here,” she says angrily. He’s maybe five foot ten to her five foot three, she notices, but very slender. Skinny, would be a better word, she thinks disapprovingly. Relenting a little she explains, “In small-town life …” then hesitates.
“Yes?” he says, in the same urgent tone he’d used earlier, giving her his full attention as if she’s about to make some world-shattering pronouncement. It makes her face feel hot and she says quickly, “Nothing, it’s just that everybody knows everybody else, and a person’s sorrow …” She hesitates again, wishing she hadn’t begun this.
“Yes?” he repeats, leaning closer to her, trying to see her face.
“It’s — it belongs to everybody. I mean, we all know each other’s lives pretty well, and we try to be — kind to each other. All the time —” She wants to say more, but the hopelessness of explaining to a stranger — a city person — what it is like to live your whole life in a small rural community forces her to a halt.
“I’m sure
you’d
be kind all the time,” he says, “but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that everybody out there always is.” He’s gazing out through the wide archway into the big room where people are sitting in groups chatting with each other. She follows his gaze, tries to see what he sees. She can’t. She doesn’t know what they all look like to him, and she glances up at him, searching for clues in his face. How beautiful he is, she bets all the young women are mad for him — but the glitter in his eyes as he stares out at her friends, her own
people,
disconcerts her. It’s too intense, it’s almost
avaricious,
she thinks — as if he were a hungry wild animal sighting his prey. She turns back to the sink quickly.
When the dishes are done, Jay pulls a chair up by Henry Swan and the men he’s talking with, while Iris goes to sit for a moment with a group of women, but now that the evening is almost over, she can’t wait to get away. She thinks she has done pretty well for her first time out, hasn’t cried once — well, almost — has managed to find suitable replies to all the commiserations and exited gracefully whenever the conversation showed signs of getting maudlin. She plans to sneak out quietly so she doesn’t have to go through the interminable goodbyes and stop-in-for-coffees, and when she moves slowly to the cloakroom, nobody appears to notice. She has become invisible.
She picks up the clean platter she brought her roast on and hurries up the stairs. At the top, she turns, goes through a small, carpeted vestibule, and steps into the church itself. It isn’t until her high heels clack on the hard vinyl tiles that she realizes she has gone too far, having meant to go straight outside through the door at the top of the stairs. She attributes her error to déjà vu, a moment’s involuntary return to her high school days when she sang in the choir and, instead of going outside, made the turn this way into the church every Sunday morning.
She’s at the end of the church next to the altar. No light leaks
through the tall windows spaced down the walls, but a glow at the opposite end of the church where the main entrance is she knows is from the streetlight on the corner. It has gifted the long, narrow space with bluish light, bringing into relief the rows of dark pews, and the shadowed altar on her left. She pauses, listening. The air is still, all sound from the basement muffled into silence. It is as if she is alone in the world. She peers into the shadows on the altar as if, caught unaware like this, she might catch a flicker of movement of something holy, a feather floating from an angel’s bright wing; or hear a celestial voice whispering a syllable of comfort, or of wisdom.
A chill runs down her spine; she makes a subdued exclamation at her own foolishness, turns, hurries the few steps through the vestibule back to the outside door, pushes it open, and rushes out onto the lawn in front of the church.
The tension she has been labouring under and not fully realized flows off her shoulders, neck, and back once she’s outside in the welcome darkness. The cool night air is such a pleasure after the vacant hollow of the church proper and the stuffiness of the room below it that she lifts her face to look up at the clusters of stars in the indigo sky, thinking, how long it’s been since she noticed the moon. It seems to her a grave dereliction of duty to have forgotten the moon.
Ah, but there it is, just rising, half-hidden behind the small ragged shadows that are the young leaves, the thinnest crescent of silver light that makes the night sky around it all the more darkly mysterious. Suddenly the basement door opens, light rushes across the dark grass, a figure steps out, and the door shuts quickly.